Burnt (Blood and Fire Book 1)

by Michelle Wheet & Lyn Lowe

way.”

  “And all I have to do is open my legs whenever you desire it.”

  “No! That’s not what this is! You don’t have to do anything you don’t want…I thought you wanted that.”

  She laughed again, this time with a harsh pitch that sent off warnings all down his spine. “You have the cock, don’t you? I remember you sticking one in me. You’re all sweetness and honor now, but I know better. I know how long it takes your kind to turn. Selfish, vicious monsters, all of you. Already, you’re tripping all over yourself to claim me. Like a dog marking his territory. Just like all the others.”

  “Gods, Amorette, that’s not what I want! Last night was a mistake! All I want, all I’ve ever wanted, is for you to be happy!”

  “You want more than that,” she hissed. “You’ve wanted more than that for years, don’t try to pretend different. I saw the way you looked at me, even before I understood it. And now that you got a taste, you’re trying to figure out a way to get more. If I don’t let you, you’ll just take it. Until you love someone else more. Then you’ll leave me all alone, used and broken.”

  “I wouldn’t!” The tears were coming now, and nothing he could do about it. They froze on his cheeks just as he knew they would, but more kept coming.

  “You would,” she answered flatly. “Just like him. Your ‘heart’s brother’ right?”

  Kaie’s anger returned, mixed with all the hatred and guilt that bore down on him every day since he failed to take that collar. “Sojun gave up everything for us!”

  “For you!” She shook her head. “I asked him, before I let him take me that first time, if he would chose you over me. He promised me he wouldn’t. He swore it. But when the time came, it was you he loved best. Always you.”

  Kaie shook, though he didn’t feel the cold anymore. “You’re wrong.”

  She laughed. That awful, wicked laugh. “No I’m not. He loved you best. And then he gave me to you. Like I’m nothing more than a whore, to be passed around whenever it suits you. But I won’t be your whore, Kaie.”

  “You’re not a whore. It was done to you! The gods know –”

  “I don’t love you. From the first time you touched me, I’ve been using you. I hate you. Just looking at you makes me want to be sick. Pretending to want you was the vilest thing I’ve ever been forced to do. But I had to do it. You had to know!”

  He didn’t want to ask. Gods, he didn’t want to. But the words were out of his mouth before he could stop them. “Know what?”

  “Enough. I’m done talking to you. Go away.”

  “Not without you,” Kaie insisted. “You’ll die out here, with this storm.”

  She tilted her head toward him again. There were no tears on her pale cheeks and no emotion he could discern either. “Get out of my sight.”

  “No.”

  She shrugged. “Fine then.”

  One of her hands lifted and for a second Kaie thought she’d called down some sort of magic. But the flashing light in her palm was no spell, only a mirror catching some glittering light hidden in the snow behind him. Peren’s mirror. “I told her I would let her have you. Before I gave her to Samuel. But only if she bought it. This is what she paid to fuck you, Kaie. This is what your seed is worth. A piece of dirty glass. Now we’re both whores.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “What I’ve planned.” She cackled. “Now you’ll know what it’s like to be alone! You’ll love four others, but I’m the first! And no matter what those others say or do, you’re going to remember this! You’re always going to know what it feels like when the person you love won’t love you back! When every kiss, every touch was just a lie!”

  She took a breath and turned back to the frozen stream. And then, at the sound of the glass breaking, Kaie understood. He knew where the red on the field of white would come from. “NO!”

  But it was too late.

  Even as he darted forward, the Amorette dug the glass deep into the skin of one wrist, then the other, splitting open the flesh with the same skill she’d used to gut her kills in the life before the soldiers.

  Thirty

  Kaie dropped to his knees and gathered her up into his arms, sobs joining the tears as he held her unresisting frame against his chest. He pressed his hands to her wounds, but the blood pulsed through his fingers with a speed that made his efforts useless. “Why? Gods dammit, Ams, why?”

  She laughed again, that same high-pitched desperate sound that set his chattering teeth on edge. “You’ll go to her when I’m dead,” she whispered. “You’ll ask for the collar. I told her I could make you. Now you will. I broke you. The one he loved best. You tell him that, when she takes you.”

  Kaie heard her speak but the words rolled off him like water. They made no impression. His eyes combed the empty white world, watching the dark red puddles from his vision form and grow in the snow at his side, seeking some miracle that would save her. “Vaughan!” he screamed. “Vaughan, help me!”

  Time stretched and danced, seeming both unbearably long and impossibly short with each fading pulse of blood spilling through his fingers. When the boy materialized from the ether he didn’t know if it was an instant or an hour after he called. However long, it was too long.

  “Help me!” he shouted, shifting so that he could hold Amorette out to him without letting up on his hold on her wrists. “You have to help me stop the bleeding!”

  “Kaie…”

  “Don’t say it!” he screamed over her cackling laughter. “Just help me!”

  Vaughan dropped down, tugging off his shirt and ripping it in half with smooth and sure motions despite the doubt written plainly on the kid’s face.

  When the other boy offered out the ragged strips to bind her wrists, Amorette shrieked and began struggling against him. Kaie cried out wordlessly, trying to hold her still enough for Vaughan to wrap her arms, but her strength was disproportionate to the life spilling out of her. Her foot caught the boy in the stomach and sent him toppling backward with an oomph. She broke her hands loose from his hold and used them to rake scratches all over his chest and back. They stung for all of an instant before going as numb as the rest of his skin, but Kaie’s blood was soon mingling with her own.

  For all its intensity, the struggle didn’t last long. Fierce as she was, Amorette could not overcome the weakness Kaie could see slipping into her. When he finally caught her arms again he couldn’t help but feel how slow her heartbeat was becoming. When Vaughan slid back down beside them she hardly managed a tired flail. They managed to get her wrists bound, though the blood stained the cloth almost instantly.

  Kaie rocked back and forth clutching her close to him as her laughter began again. It was weaker this time, soft enough that he could almost mistake it for the husky and warm one he barely remembered from the day on the hill. He could almost pretend everything was going to be all right and that when she healed it would be his Amorette again, not the bitter and manipulative woman who was giving up everything just to break him.

  Vaughan climbed back to his feet but Kaie could not join him without letting her go. The boy gave up on convincing him of the wisdom quickly and instead went about yanking down sticks and branches from the trees over them. It sent down showers of collected snow but they were being covered with so much already that it hardly made a difference.

  In short order Vaughan was constructing a crude fire pit in the middle of the snowstorm. Kaie kept his doubts about the effectiveness of the efforts to himself, mostly because he was terrified that one word would break the spell of the silence and cost him Amorette. There were no storms like this back wherever his home was but it didn’t take an expert to see that the wood was wet and frozen, unlikely to catch fire even if they had flint to start it with. And there was no kindling to speak of, which would make the task even more impossible.

  When Vaughan leaned over the rough-looking pile Kaie expected nothing. But fire burst into life with an explosion of heat and light that sent the wildling topp
ling backward.

  He gaped, blinking at the pink and blue after-image floating around his vision, temporarily blinding him. In his agony over Amorette he’d forgotten what Vaughan was. What he could do.

  Vaughan sat up from where he’d fallen, rubbing snow and soot off his face and avoiding looking Kaie in the eye. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want it to be so…explosive. But it’s been a long time since I’ve channeled so much, and with all of this…”

  He thrust Amorette back out toward the wildling. “You can fix her! Really heal her!”

  Vaughan shook his head slowly. “No. Even if I wanted to, no.”

  “What do you mean ‘if you wanted to’? Fix her!”

  “It doesn’t work like that!” The shout startled Kaie. Vaughan never spoke above a low murmur. But the boy was no mouse now. “I don’t ‘use magic,’ I touch the Balla Jhoda. The Spirit of Life. I have no spells to control it, no hand motions to twist it to my will. It doesn’t do what we demand of it, only what my heart asks of it. I want to help you, Kaie. Because of what you’ve done, and because you are my friend. But my heart will never, never desire to save this creature. Not after what she had done to my sister.” He glared. “Or have you forgotten already?”

  He did. For a minute, maybe two, he did. And he couldn’t feel guilty about it. Kaie shook with the need to force the matter. But he remembered Peren now, so he did nothing. He longed to argue, to defend